The Doomsday Clock Is Moved Closer To Midnight

Harperdog writes "The Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock from 6 minutes to midnight to 5 minutes to midnight. The Board deliberated on the decision and came to the conclusion based on a variety of events: failure on climate policy, Fukushima, nuclear proliferation, etc. This article is a good explanation of the policy decision. Lawrence Krauss said, 'As we see it, the major challenge at the heart of humanity's survival in the 21st century is how to meet energy needs for economic growth in developing and industrial countries without further damaging the climate, exposing people to loss of health and community, and without risking further spread of nuclear weapons, and in fact setting the stage for global reductions.'"

Comments

Zeno

[Sebastopol]

This is so stupid. I'm a lefty eco groovy person, but this is just pathetic. Almost as sad as Heston's "From my cold dead hands" battlecry.

It just puts emphasis on the moonbats on the left, and ammo for Faux News, rather than addressing the issues in a non sensationalist way.

Sigh.

Re:Zeno

[Anonymous Coward]

They're just trying to stay relevant. We all forgot about them when the Cold War ended, and they crave attention again.

Re:Zeno

[93 Escort Wagon]

They're just trying to stay relevant. We all forgot about them when the Cold War ended, and they crave attention again.

You may have been joking/snarky/whatever, I'm not sure; but in all seriousness - I'd completely forgot about these guys and their "doomsday clock" until I saw this Slashdot story!

Re:Zeno

[timeOday]

So we can sit here and take turns throwing feces at the idea of a doomsday clock, or we could have an interesting discussion on whether it is possible to meet the world's future energy needs(?) without destroying the environment and/or nuclear proliferation.

Re:Zeno

[Baloroth]

The real problem is that the clock wasn't intended to represent things like climate change. The entire idea was to show how close we were to the world ending tomorrow. Climate change and the like won't end the world tomorrow. The clock really only even makes sense in the context of nuclear war or other dramatic world-changing events (Doomsday). It isn't called the "Doomcentury" clock for good reason.

Re:Zeno

[Curunir_wolf]

Maybe not ours but is life really defined by humans?

Yep, it really is. I mean, who will be around to define it after we're gone?

Re:Zeno

[poetmatt]

Why is it part of any political spectrum? what kind of a US centric shitpost is that? I'd say the doomsday clock is significant at doing what it does for the reasons it does, which are not at all political.

How about the fact that the world is generally on a decline? Economies falling due to greed and corruption, change being stifled, advancing our society via positive means being directly subverted by greed. That isn't part of $political-stance and is a part of that is that being on a decline long enough does equal significant military outcomes of negative effect.

While it is labeled as doomsday, it is a honest enough indicator of "how's the world doing overall?".

Re:Zeno

[SgtXaos]

Aside from a few million pounds (?) of it we have shot into space, all the metal that was here is still here. At some point, when the naturally available materials are simply too costly to mine, someone will figure out a good way to mine the landfills and dig those "gone" materials back up.

Re:Zeno

[CapOblivious2010]

I think nuking even "just" a city or two (say, NYC + DC) would count as "significantly" hurting the US. If US planners believed that DPRK had a couple of nukes and a delivery mechanism of some sort (ICBM or suitcase, whatever), I think it would SIGNIFICANTLY discourage them from attacking DPRK, especially w/ nukes.

Re:Zeno

[shutdown -p now]

The trick is being able to nuke in response even after you are nuked first. If all you have is, say, half a dozen ICBMs, then your enemy just nukes their locations with their first strike, and that's it. Not to mention that a few ICBMs can be shot down quite easily.

That's why early on sheer numbers were very important for MAD - you had to have enough strategic bombers that at least some would get in the air and get through to enemy's cities; and later on, subs became important as an effectively invincible retaliatory strike mechanism.

Eventually

[mpeskett]

Sooner or later they're going to box themselves into a corner - they only have so many discrete 1-minute steps they can take before they find that the world is more fucked up than they thought possible, but somehow still carrying on.

Then what? Leave it at 1-minute to midnight, or edge ever closer in smaller and smaller increments?

Re:Eventually

[ArsonSmith]

"A symbolic clock is as emotionally reassuring as a picture of oxygen to a drowning man." -Dr. Manhattan

Re:Eventually

[ElectricTurtle]

This is what happened to (neo-)Malthusianism. Every generation since Malthus has predicted disaster at some invented threshold, and over and over these thresholds are surpassed. Humanity is immeasurably adaptable, precisely because when the crunch comes previously impossible things are made possible by that adaptability.

I think that this move is particularly disingenuous and calls into question the group's whole integrity considering that the real, global effect of Fukushima has been nation after nation scaling back and drawing down nuclear power. I personally think it's retarded, but nonetheless it should be counted as one the most major changes in direction in the nuclear power industry in a generation, and this group thinks it has the opposite effect? There's just no pleasing some people, obviously.

Re:Eventually

[bughunter]

Well perhaps the clock metaphor isn't doing them service anymore if the majority of reactions are to the metaphor than the message.

Ultimately the point is, "we're going to pollute ourselves into the stone age." If that bit is being lost because the clock metaphor is becoming trite, then perhaps they should look for a new analogy.

This being slashdot, I think you know what I'm driving at...

Re:Eventually

[Hentes]

Which is exactly not the behaviour you would expect from a clock. The metaphor is flawed.

Re:Eventually

[LordKronos]

Which is exactly not the behaviour you would expect from a clock. The metaphor is flawed.

Flawed? Please, I'll take their clock any day. So it moves backward on average 1-2 times per decade. Big deal. My clock has to do it once per year.

Politics in Science

[v(*_*)vvvv]

There is nothing scientific about this clock, and most scientists would surely admit it. It is political and is meant to sway public opinion. So what we have here are either a) fake scientists, b) real scientists shooting themselves in the foot, or c) politicians.

The whole point of the scientific method is to be grounded on evidence and be void of any political, social, or even personal biases. I have nothing against this silly clock, but as long as science lends its name to garbage such as this, science will always have a hard time in politics claiming itself to be scientific.

Re:Well, they're right.

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming that you ignore the fact that 'the environment' in Western nations is vastly better off than it was in 1947. We don't get thousands of people dying in a London smog these days, for example.

That's in part because the west has exported its manufacturing of consumer goods (and therefore exported its pollution and environmental degradation) to "developing nations" that have lower wages and fewer environmental regulations. Cheap goods for us = smog for China.

MAD

[SirGarlon]

Now granted, MAD works better when your enemy is a large country who values their lives - it gets a bit iffy when your enemy is a small band of religious wackos who don't much care whether they're dead or alive, as long as they've made their point.

Just to recap, "MAD" stands for "Mutually Assured Destruction." If the enemy is a small band of religious wackos they can't get enough nukes to destroy a major country. One city, sure; ten cities, maybe; destroy the country, no way. So they can do some damage but not destroy their target. Likewise they are hard to locate and easy to disperse. You'd be surprised how useless nukes are against a moving enemy whom you can't locate to within a few miles' radius. So the whole MAD strategy becomes irrelevant. Neither side can destroy the other but they can nuke each other ... maybe multiple times. This is why nuclear proliferation is scary: it changes the stable MAD scenario to an unstable one where there is no deterrent to small-scale nuclear exchange.